Archive for September 2015

We’re introducing a new feature of the Procedural Fairness Blog today. For new research on procedural fairness, we’ve already recommended our quarterly research reports. One of the authors of the quarterly reports, Justine Greve (M.A., American Studies), a staff member at the Kansas Court of Appeals, is going to put her past training in public radio to work for us by interviewing authors of some of the new research we think you’ll find of interest.

Her first interview (available in either an abridged or extended format) is with Kelly Frailing and Diana Carreon, who did an interesting study of a drug court in Laredo, Texas, where most of the population is Hispanic–and generally bilingual.

After watching judges and participants switch between Spanish and English at the Laredo drug court, Frailing and Carreon wanted to find out how being able to speak with the judge in Spanish influenced people’s perceptions of fairness in that court. They found that participants saw bilingualism as a positive feature of the court, even reporting that they felt the ability to communicate in Spanish was important to success in their case.

This may seem unsurprising in a community where the vast majority of the population is Hispanic: anyone would feel more comfortable speaking to a judge in his or her primary language. But almost all of these drug-court participants were bilingual from an early age, fluent in English as well as Spanish.

In the interview, Frailing and Carreon discuss their study and interpret their findings, suggesting that language in a court setting may mean more to people than just being able to understand and to be understood. Steve Leben